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Who Needs Some Lab Gear?

First, welcome to the new design of the blog! There’s still some minor housekeeping to do, but it’s more or less intact and ready to go. If you find something that doesn’t work, let me know. If you have any ideas for what to put in that empty space in the right menu bar on the front page, send them over…

Anyway, back to the lab gear.

For years, I’ve had way more lab gear than I need. I had multiple cabinets of space and power thanks to one of the companies I used to work at, and there always seemed to be hardware to throw in there, courtesy of whichever hardware company had stuff that needed to go away. Once upon a time, the lab got used….a lot. We ran labs on demand for VCE training out of there, we did beta testing on VMware software, we hacked and bashed together deployment scripts and had a lot of fun with it.

Lately, though, it mostly sits there, doing nothing. There are currently 14 physical hosts running 20 VMs, not exactly the most active environment. It has, however, been running my blog since sometime in 2009, which was reason enough to let it sit there and run.

Going to work for Microsoft, however, has changed the dynamic a little. Working in the Azure engineering group means that I don’t really need to have a stack of hardware to run something like a blog anymore (not that it was ever really needed, of course). I’ve moved everything over to an Azure App Service, so no need for servers at all, much less physical ones!

So, what to do with the lab gear: I’m going to give away what I can, and recycle the rest.

Below is a list of everything I have, and it all needs to go. If you want it, just let me know and either make plans to pick it up, or give me a way to pay for shipping. Anything that isn’t claimed in the next 10 days or so will get powered off and sent to the recycling center.

In addition to the switch and server hardware, there’s a bunch of SFPs, and a whole bunch of old hardware that I haven’t even tried powering on in years, an old FortiGate 100A firewall, some monitors, more cables than I know what to do with. Trust me, you don’t want an HP MSA50 stuffed with 12 SATA drives. No one does. I also have one of the few remaining Virtensys boxes in existence, which is kinda cool.

Caveat in case you missed it: this is old stuff. All of the hosts are running vSphere 6.5 U1 just fine, but I’m betting the CPUs will limit upgrades at some point, and obviously there’s no hardware support or maintenance on anything. But it’s free!

Interested? Have questions? DM me on Twitter and let me know. Local-ish to Charlotte? Bring a truck over and we’ll load it up . Let’s do some spring cleaning and get this hardware somewhere it’ll do some good.